October 2010

My proposal for removing up to 100,000 public servants is relatively straightforward although it will have to be accompanied by substantial reforms in work practices, promotion policy, pension entitlements and attitude. For example, the defined benefit, indexed linked pension scheme is simply too expensive for our country to afford for the foreseeable future. The abolition of this pension must include all public servants whether employed now, in the past or in the future. If new legislation or constitutional amendment is required to make this happen, then so be it. The fact that there are people who retired over ten years ago and are presently receiving pension that are actually higher now than their salary they were on when they left, is outrageous. […]

At the moment there are 450,000 people without paid employment out of a workforce of 1.9 million. Also consider that 460,000 of the total workforce do not compete for jobs or are in any danger of losing their jobs because they are our public servants. So, in the real world, the actual number of people available to work (or be made redundant) is 1,450,000 people. I’m sure even one of our overpaid bankers could work out that 32 per cent of the people in the “free labour market” are without jobs. That’s right folks, the real rate of unemployment in this country among the wealth-creating sectors is 32 per cent or one in three. […]

In the Celtic Tiger era, Eamonn Blaney would have been the embodiment of Cool Hibernia. With his dark-rimmed designer specs and sharp pin-striped jackets, you might still mistake him for a successful entrepreneur or corporate executive if you were to see him sipping an espresso in one of the cafés near his home in Howth, a traditionally prosperous peninsula jutting out from Dublin. But the truth is this 46-year-old Dubliner is carefully counting the cost of every small indulgence these days.

Blaney is on the dole: one of the 455,000 citizens of the Irish Republic unemployed or under-employed. When he signs on, he is surrounded by traumatised Tiger Cubs, a hedonistic young generation foolishly reared to believe that their wise elders had somehow suddenly discovered a magical cure for the centuries-old scourges of economic misery and mass emigration. Blaney’s own grand misfortune was to graduate with an MBA from Ireland’s top-rated university, Trinity College Dublin, in 2008 just as the international banking crisis erupted and the southern Irish property bubble spectacularly burst. The two start-up businesses he has founded since have both failed to pay the bills as Dublin has become trapped in a particularly fearsome downward financial spiral. […]